Many companies or organizations have a call center for selling services and products or providing customer services. A customer may call into, usually by dialing a toll-free number, the call center to subscribe to a service or to ask for customer services. Usually an automatic response system replies to the call and asks the caller to keep holding until an agent is available for the caller. The customer has to wait on the phone so as to keep his place in a waiting queue.
This is awful and frustrating experience to a caller during a busy time when he or she probably has to wait a long time before an agent appears. He is also not sure how long he will have to wait. Toll charges, either at the company side or at the customer side, are wasted during the unproductive waiting time and many connection lines are wastefully occupied as well.
Directed to the above problem, U.S. Pat. No. 5,627,884 issued to Mark Williams, et al., discloses a method in which the call center will disconnect the inbound call and will call back to the caller when an agent is available to the caller. The caller does not need to remain on hold, but his place in the waiting queue is kept. In effect, the caller is kept on a “virtual hold”. However, the method disclosed in the '884 patent still has many disadvantages as discussed below.
The caller does not have any control over when the call center will return the call. Even though the rough timing may be convenient to the caller, the exact moment the phone rings may not be. For example, the caller may be in another room, or even on the telephone with another call.
Furthermore, the caller may have lost his interest in waiting for the call or for some reason simply can not wait for the call. In such a situation, the call center wastes its resources in trying the call.
If the caller calls into the call center from his own extension in a large company, it and will be not convenient for the call center to call back. Specifically, the call center will get the main number, and will be unaware of how to contact the caller.
In general, the prior arrangement of requiring a call center to call back results in many situations where the call center attempts to call back the caller but the attempted call back is unsuccessful.